Reason #23 The New Testament Roots of Democracy
The facts of history strongly indicate
that the Christian faith deserves credit for being the true impetus behind our
current conceptions of democracy.
Most people today appreciate the utter
importance of democracy—allowing every person to have an equal say in the way
society functions. The premise of
democracy just seems obvious to us in modern times. Giving potential victims and
their oppressors an equal vote in matters that affect the pursuit of happiness will
keep the would-be victims from having their human rights violated and the
would-be oppressors from executing their self-serving schemes. When seen
against the entire backdrop of human history, however, this principle of
“government of the people, by the people, and for the people” is actually both
rare and new.
Chiefdom, monarchy, and tyranny seem to be
the default settings of human government, and virtually all the governance we
see in historical times was enjoyed by warrior chiefs and kings who helped
themselves to the best spoils of what their societies could offer. And although
we admire the early democratic policies of Athens and Rome, these democracies actually
excluded huge portions of their populations who were slaves and non-citizen
residents. Additionally, because they had no Constitutions to set boundaries on
their liberties, the self-interested majorities in Athens and Rome were free to
trample the human rights of minorities (and they routinely did).
All true human rights-based democracies
owe their existence, not to Athens or Rome, but to the New Testament. This is
because Jesus taught His followers that an entire congregation should be called
upon to settle disputed matters—to make decisions collectively, as a group, and
not to rely on leaders alone for direction (Matthew 18:17-18).1 And this
explains why the first Christians chose their first ministers by consensus, a
policy they learned from Jesus and which served them very well (Acts 6:3-5).2
But this was not the way the chiefs and kings around them did things.
Even in Britain, before the 1500s, popular
elections were unheard of. After all, Britain was still a firmly entrenched monarchy,
and the law-making role of parliament was quite limited and unclear. But during
the back-to-the-New-Testament fervor of the Puritan Reformation, Christians
began to choose their pastors by vote. This was considered a radical idea by
most of their Church of England brethren who opposed it. We have the account
from as early as 1634, for example, of a Puritan congregation in the
Netherlands that met to vote on a new minister. The emcee of the meeting noted
the vote: “'I see the men choose him,
but what do the women do?' Hereupon the women lift up their hands too."
It was in the U.S. that true
democracy first spread beyond the church. In 1620, the Puritan pilgrims aboard
the Mayflower created and signed, with no monarch’s input or consent, a pledge
of self-governance and cooperation, the Mayflower Compact. They also elected
John Carver to be their governor, choosing him just as they had chosen their
pastors back home, by the voice of the congregation. One historian referred to
this as “the first experiment in consensual government in Western history
between individuals with one another, and not with a monarch.”
By 1632 when Puritan
investors rose to leadership in the Massachusetts Bay Company (forerunner to
the city of Boston), the governor, the deputy, and the assistants were all
chosen by election.
Even as late as the 1780s,
only 20 percent of the adult males in Britain were permitted to vote, while 55
percent were voting in the newly formed United States. In fact, as late as the
1790s, the highly respected parliamentarian Edmund Burke was acting as the
spokesperson for a substantial number of British politicians and thinkers who
opposed democracy as a dangerous and oppressive form of government.
In our current age of
anti-Christian sentiment, critics may be reluctant to admit that, actually, it
was not Athens, or Rome, or even Britain, that brought the world democracy as
we know and revere it today—democracy under a Constitution of human rights. It
was in fact the founder of the Christian faith and the people who followed His
instructions who handed us this remarkable gift, and we are all deeply indebted
to them for it.
The facts of history strongly indicate
that the Christian faith deserves credit for being the true impetus behind our
current conceptions of democracy.
1 Matthew
18:17 Tell it to the congregation: but if he refuses to hear the congregation, let him be
to you as a Gentile…18 Whatever you judge on earth shall
be confirmed in heaven.
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